


More Than These Bones

by rarelypoetic



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean Bears The Mark of Cain, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Fix-it, Episode: s10e10 The Hunter Games, M/M, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3235349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarelypoetic/pseuds/rarelypoetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Mark of Cain festers under Dean's skin like a rotten tooth and dredges up an old childhood memory. Castiel tries to talk him out of a spiral of self-deprecation. It starts about as well as you'd think, but ends better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Than These Bones

When Dean was younger, he would get toothaches a lot. He complained to John about them almost every day (this was back before he learned that nothing short of a heart attack was going to earn him any sympathy). John would respond the same way every time, telling Dean that it was because he was grinding his teeth too hard in his sleep. Growing pains, he’d say. No matter how often Dean complained, John never did anything but tell him to suck it up and soldier on. 

It went on for three months, until one morning Dean woke up screaming and wouldn’t stop. They were in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing but strings of vacant motels for miles. Sam saw his big brother was upset and soon began crying himself. It wasn’t long until he was sobbing beside Dean on the twin bed, big fat drops of tears and snot running down his face. John lost it. 

He took Dean’s hand and led him outside to the empty parking lot. Dean was still crying - it was reflexive at this point. The pain throbbed unendurably throughout his entire skull. He couldn’t help it. John sat him on the hood of the Impala and dug around in the trunk for a few moments. 

He came back with a small black satchel. Dean recognized it from all of the times that John had come home bleeding and had to stitch himself up in the grimy bathroom of whatever motel they were in, telling Dean to watch because one day he’d have to help his old man out with this kind of thing.

John took out two shiny metal tools from the satchel and told Dean to open up. Dean, obedient to a fault, even then, did just that. 

“Be brave, Dean,” John said. “It’ll be over quick, and you’ll be good as new.”

-

Dean has been fiddling with his shirt sleeve for an hour now, trying to distract himself from the steady pulse of the mark under his skin. It’s like a second heartbeat. Like a toothache that resonates throughout every part of him. He’s lucky he’s alone in his room, because if Sam or Castiel were here, they’d get on his case immediately about the way he’s biting his lips bloody. He can’t help it. It almost feels good to tear himself up a little.

The mark does that to him. 

Dean startles at a knock on his bedroom door. It can only be two people, and he’s pretty sure Sam isn’t in the mood for a late night chat. “Come in,” Dean says tiredly. It’s easier not to resist. 

The door opens and Castiel walks in like he’s guilty. He takes one look at Dean’s bloody lips and frowns. 

“What are you doing here?” Dean asks. 

“Sam and I were worried. We haven’t seen you in hours. We thought...” 

“You thought what?” Dean studies the look on Castiel’s face and shudders at what he finds. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.” 

“How have you been feeling?” Castiel asks lightly, visibly aware that he’s walking on eggshells. 

“Shitty,” Dean grunts. “This--” he gestures to the mark, “--has been giving me trouble all day.” 

“We’re working on it,” Castiel says, looking abruptly exhausted. “How have you been otherwise? Beyond the physical, I mean.” 

“Fine,” Dean says casually. Castiel graces him with a very unimpressed frown and Dean immediately prickles. “What do you expect me to say, Cas? ‘I’m fucking horrible’? ‘Cause I gotta be honest with you, man, the inside of my head isn’t pretty right now. It’s like a 24/7 _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ special in here.” 

“Dean.” Castiel says the word like a benediction. He sits beside Dean and rests a hand on the knee closest to him. That one warm point of contact makes something thick and gluey stick in Dean’s throat. “If you need someone to talk to--”

“Believe me, you don’t want to hear it,” Dean spits. 

“Of course I do,” Castiel says firmly. He looks, God help him, completely bewildered that Dean would even suggest he wouldn’t. “We’ve been through a lot, haven’t we? There isn’t anything you can say that will scare me away.” 

“Yeah, well I don’t want to shatter any lingering illusions here about how righteous or pure I am,” Dean says sourly. 

Castiel’s frown deepens. “What makes you righteous is not that you are inherently pure or holy. It’s that you have this terrific capability for evil inside of you, yet you choose to cast it away in favor of doing good. Do you even understand the kind of strength of will that takes?”

“Cast it away, huh?” Dean lets out a little self-deprecating chuckle and reaches back to scrape his fingers across his scalp. “You call murdering a room full of people _casting it away_?”

“That’s the mark,” Castiel says earnestly. “That’s not you. That has never been you.” 

“I’ve killed people before the mark, Cas. Innocent people. I’ve spent my whole goddamn life tearing other people’s lives apart. I don’t know how you don’t see that.” 

Castiel falls silent for a moment. He takes his hand from Dean’s knee and folds them both in his lap placidly. “Have you forgiven me, Dean?”

Dean blinks, bewildered at this odd non-sequitur. “For what?”

“For everything,” Castiel says simply, shrugging with a very human expression of humility on his face. “Do you forgive me for working with Crowley behind your back, for breaking Sam’s wall, for opening Purgatory, for _abandoning_ you in Purgatory, for beating you bloody, for disappearing with the angel tab--” 

“Okay, all right, all right! I get it.” Dean meets Castiel’s gaze head-on, eyes concealing nothing. “I thought we were past this, Cas. Yes. I forgave you a long time ago.” 

Castiel nods like he expected the answer, but everything in his expression reads differently. That’s pure relief Dean sees in his eyes now. That’s the look of a man who thought himself condemned. Dean would know. 

“Why?” Castiel asks quietly. 

Why? There are a lot of reasons why. Not all that Dean is willing to admit out loud. “I had a lot of time to think about all this, y’know. All those times you weren’t around. I know now that you had good intentions. Even right from the very beginning, man. You just have this unfortunate habit of thinking you can go it alone, do it all by yourself.” 

“Sound familiar?” Cas asks wryly, mouth quirking in some distorted approximation of a smile.

“Yeah.” Dean rolls his eyes. “You and me, Cas. We’re one of a kind.” 

“That’s my point. Everything you have done you’ve done with good intentions. You carry the world on your shoulders, and when it inevitably begins to crush you, you blame it on yourself. You think every bad thing that happens in your vicinity is a result of you not being strong enough. But this is not about inadequacy, Dean. No one, man or angel, is a saint. There is no such thing.” 

Dean scoffs. “Tell that to God.” 

“He too is flawed,” Castiel replies gravely. 

“Look, Cas,” Dean stops and swallows three times in a row, that same rubber cement feeling in his throat again. “I don’t-- I _can’t_ see it that way. It goes against everything in me.”

Castiel clenches both of his fists, jaw ticcing. “Dammit, Dean, what will it take?” He looks at Dean openly, nakedly, every part of him pleading for something that Dean is entirely incapable of giving him. 

Dean wants to get on his knees and beg Castiel to give up on him, to stop wasting his time and looking at him like the universe starts and ends at his feet. 

“I don’t know.” Dean curls in on himself abruptly, fingers shaking as they dig shallow trenches into his own biceps. He can’t remember a time when he felt this vulnerable in front of another living being. Getting his chest ripped to shreds by hell hounds with Sam watching was easier to stand. “I don’t think...” Dean sucks in a deep breath and fights viciously against the panic building behind his rib cage. “I don’t think there’s anything, anymore. I don’t know if I ever believed there was.” 

Dean’s not looking at Cas, can’t stomach it right now, but he feels the shift in the air. Feels how Castiel stops breathing, how his words were probably like a kick to the gut, a punch to the sternum. He _aches_ suddenly, all over. “I wish you wouldn’t have faith in me anymore.” 

“I don’t know anything else,” Castiel says. The words are hollow. “From the moment I saw you, I haven’t known anything else.” 

Dean gathers the strength to glance at him and immediately regrets it. Castiel looks utterly destroyed. He hasn’t looked anything close to this since he woke up after opening Purgatory and promised he’d find a way to make it up to Dean. This is entirely... entirely Dean’s fault.

The mark pulses like a sore tooth and Dean rakes his fingernails over the raised skin in frustration, thinking again of how good it would feel to claw it right out of his body. It wouldn’t be worth it, though, because then he would have to watch as it manifested again, knitting itself into Dean’s flesh like a stubborn weed whose roots extended throughout Dean’s entire being.

“Even if there was some way to get this thing out of me,” Dean says, pressing fingernails into the mark. “I’ll never be able to start over. I can’t erase what I’ve done.” 

“Neither can I,” Castiel says, much more steadily than he looks. He reaches over and takes Dean’s hand - the one that is scratching at the mark - and holds it in both of his, slotting their fingers together. “We’re both sullied, it seems.” 

“How can you live with that?” 

Castiel shrugs with a great deal of weight on his shoulders. “The same way anyone does. By knowing that I won’t let it happen again, and by hoping that I can begin to make up for it in any capacity I am able.” He rubs his thumb over Dean’s broad palm. It’s cold.

“I told you once that I was afraid I might kill myself.” Dean makes a soft, strangled sound and Castiel squeezes his fingers in response. “But I’ve learned that death does not absolve anyone. There would be no purpose in my obliteration. So I gave myself a purpose: to do good. Because that is the only thing I can do, Dean.”

Castiel is incredible. Dean knows this just as he knows the beat of his own heart. Dean exhales deeply. “Are you going to stay here?” 

“If I’m welcome,” Castiel says carefully, fingers suddenly restless against Dean’s. Dean adjusts his palms so their hands are exactly aligned. 

“Of course you are. I wasn’t kidding when I said that I need you, y’know.”

“I wasn’t sure if that still applied.” 

“It’s always gonna apply.” Dean tries for a smile but falls about ten paces short. He thinks Castiel knows what he means, anyway. He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “You’re not going to get rid of me anytime soon.” 

“Good,” Castiel says simply. His smile is much more successful than Dean’s. Their eyes catch almost by accident, and Castiel finds that he can’t quite look away. Very slowly, he raises their linked hands to his mouth and tentatively presses his lips to the rough skin of Dean’s knuckles. It’s hardly even a kiss - more of a gentle meeting of lips and skin - but it warms Dean all the same. 

-

Dean wakes up in the dark with a line of heat draped over his chest and a pointy nose poking into the back of his neck. The clock on his nightstand reads four in the morning. 

He must have stayed up talking to Castiel until they both passed out. Castiel rests more often these days, though it is still more of a luxury than a necessity. He doesn’t have much longer until it becomes one, though, or so he tells Dean. There’s no harm in practicing. 

Dean trails his hand along the length of Castiel’s thick bicep and down to his forearm, which rests right over Dean’s breast bone. Castiel shifts behind him, mumbling incoherently into his neck.

Dean feels a phantom ache in his chest, one that quickly travels up his windpipe and takes root in his mouth, exactly like a rotted tooth. He can almost hear John’s voice telling him to be brave, almost feel the cold touch of metal to his soft palate and the searing pain as the tooth was wrenched out from its root.

John was right; he had felt good as new afterwards. After he’d licked the blood from his raw gums and went back inside to give little Sammy a hug. 

“Dean?” Castiel’s solemn voice interrupts his reverie. Dean snaps himself out of it and turns over to face him. They are much closer than Dean expected, noses nearly touching. Castiel almost goes cross-eyed trying to get a good look at him. Dean, unexpectedly, feels a laugh tear out of his chest. 

“Go back to sleep, Cas.” 

“Are you okay?” Castiel asks earnestly, ignoring him. “I sensed that you were distressed. It woke me.” 

“Sorry. I’m okay now. I was just... reminiscing.” Dean closes his eyes, hoping that Castiel will follow his example. 

But Castiel makes a soft, displeased sound in his throat and nudges his nose against Dean’s. “I meant to tell you, earlier...” 

“What?” Dean mumbles, half-awake.

“I love you.” 

Oh. Dean’s heart pumps viciously in his chest. He is aware of everything all at once. “Oh.” 

“Goodnight, Dean.” 

Dean opens his eyes and finds that Castiel has closed his. His face is smooth and impassive. To the untrained eye it would look like marble. To Dean, Castiel’s face is a map of emotion - worry, satisfaction, guilt, pride. 

Dean wants to ease that line of tension between his brows. On impulse, he leans forward and touches his lips to Castiel’s mouth. Castiel immediately comes to life against him, jaw falling slack and lips yielding to his touch. They kiss unabashedly for several seconds, too deeply entrenched in one another to worry about technicalities such as whether or not they are exchanging too much spit or if their timing is sloppy. 

Castiel licks away the ache from Dean’s mouth. When they part, it is as though it never existed in the first place. One day, maybe Dean will feel good enough about himself to say those words back to Castiel. He hopes so.

For now, Dean closes his eyes and sleeps through the whole night like he hasn’t in months.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. I wrote this in one sitting and completely spur of the moment based on one-liner I had sitting in my drafts for months. My purpose in writing for spn is basically to scratch an itch that will never be scratched by the show itself (y'know two adult men having a semi-constructive conversation which ends in cuddles and kisses), so hopefully I succeeded in that respect.
> 
> Feedback would be immensely appreciated.


End file.
